ABSTRACT
To understand royal financial strategies and the responses of the elite to those strategies, historians need to account for the institutional specificities across the juridically unequal landscape that characterized early modern France. This chapter focuses on the money handlers who provided valuable financial services to the crown but who often found themselves in precarious positions both with regard to the crown and to local populations. It examines the networks of lenders who supported the financial intermediation of privileged corps. Research suggests that financiers in the Old Regime functioned first and foremost as intermediaries for the crown. Local factors may also have determined the extent of any such shift toward local cooptation in financial activities. Financial ties bound members of the local elite to financiers; political interests were not so unidirectional in either an antagonistic or mutual way, and it is in this realm where local institutions came to play a crucial role in influencing the relationships.
